Greg Lane's Bloghttps://greglane.me/index.xml
Recent content on Greg Lane's BlogHugo -- gohugo.ioWed, 25 Jan 2017 09:16:34 +0000Launch of New Site Japan Rail Ticketshttps://greglane.me/web-sites/launch-of-new-site-japan-rail-tickets/
Wed, 25 Jan 2017 09:16:34 +0000https://greglane.me/web-sites/launch-of-new-site-japan-rail-tickets/<p>Something we&rsquo;ve noticed from running our site <a href="https://tokyocheapo.com">Tokyo Cheapo</a> is that there&rsquo;s not enough info out there about how to do rail in Japan.</p>
<p>The reason so many people have been coming to our site to research and to get information is simply because the Japan rail system is so difficult to understand. To give you an idea of the complexity, in Japan there is not one national rail company - there are 6! While they all have JR at the start, JR Hokkaido, JR East, JR Tokai, JR West, JR Shikoku and JR Kyushu all operate independently except for services that run between their zones of control which require complex revenue and cost sharing. Another case in point is the Tokyo Metropolis. If you arrive at Narita Airport, you have the choice of a either a JR train or a private railway train to get you into the the city. From there, you can jump onto one of two subway systems. If you need to go into the suburbs, you can catch one of seven different private rail companies - most with multiple lines!</p>
<p>Despite this complexity, it need not be so difficult for international visitors to understand. One of the main reasons it is, is due to the siloed nature of these companies - each puts out information about its own services.</p>
<p>The answer is to provide a simplified portal with the information that visitors need to know along with methods for them to purchase what they need. To this end, we&rsquo;ve launched a new site in our portfolio - <a href="https://japanrailtickets.com">Japan Rail Tickets</a>. Unlike the official sites, our focus will be on the user experience - focused, easy to digest information in an easily explored format.</p>
<p>If you&rsquo;d like to work together with us on Japan Rail Tickets, please get in touch.</p>
New Project: Eventr – One Stop Listing Site for Japan Eventshttps://greglane.me/web-sites/new-project-eventr-one-stop-listing-site-for-japan-events/
Thu, 08 Jan 2015 03:16:34 +0000https://greglane.me/web-sites/new-project-eventr-one-stop-listing-site-for-japan-events/<p>Once a week, I work for a Japanese start-up called <a href="http://eventregist.com">EventRegist</a>. EventRegist is an event ticketing platform &#8211; kind of in the same space as sites like EventBrite and Peatix. When I&#8217;m there I work on localising the English versions of the EventRegist apps and I sometimes do front-end interaction prototyping and testing. Recently, I&#8217;ve been working on a new project &#8211; <a href="http://eventr.jp/">Eventr.jp</a>.</p>
<p>In case you haven&#8217;t figured it out from the web 2.0 naming, it&#8217;s pronounced &#8220;eventer&#8221;. In wasei eigo (Japanese English) it means someone who organises and runs events. The problem that Eventr addresses, is the difficulty in finding a consolidated listing of business related events in Japan. There are hundreds of business related events every day &#8211; but keeping track of them is almost impossible. Typically events are listed on the site of the organiser, the venue and often the event ticketing platform. So (before Eventr) if you wanted to keep up with events of interest, you would need to sign up to EventRegist, Peatix, Doorkeeper, Meetup.com and Tixee as well as to regularly scan the web sites of big venues like Makuhari Messe, Tokyo Bigsight, Tokyo International Forum and Tokyo Midtown. Even then, you&#8217;ll likely miss most events of interest. Additionally, we&#8217;re trying to provide as much information as we can in both Japanese and English &#8211; with an emphasis of cutting through the event organiser marketing speak and letting you know exactly what is of interest with a particular event.</p>
<p>On the technical side (the design definitely needs some work) it&#8217;s built on WordPress using a Zurb Foundation based theme called <a href="https://github.com/olefredrik/foundationpress/" target="_blank">FoundationPress</a>. For those unfamiliar with Foundation, it&#8217;s a front end framework that allows you to build and deploy sites quickly. Another similar framework (which I used to use) is Twitter Bootstrap. Foundation is very light weight and flexible and built for mobile right out of the box.</p>
<p>We&#8217;re still learning exactly what people want, but the site aims to provide a simple way to browse events of interest, search, register your events as well as signing up for events and adding them to your calendar. If anyone has any ideas or feedback on the site &#8211; features you like, features you don&#8217;t, features you want, please let me know!</p>
‘Growshrink’ jQuery Plugin for Scaling Elements Up and Downhttps://greglane.me/web-sites/growshrink-jquery-plugin-for-scaling-elements-up-and-down/
Mon, 12 Nov 2012 01:21:12 +0000https://greglane.me/web-sites/growshrink-jquery-plugin-for-scaling-elements-up-and-down/<p>I just put some more code on github. This is based on the scripts I used on the <a href="http://sequoiaheritage.com">Sequoia Heritage Site</a> to get the growing/shrinking animations.</p>
<p>You can download/fork the plugin on github here: <a href="https://github.com/greglane/growshrink.js" target="_blank"><a href="https://github.com/greglane/growshrink.js">https://github.com/greglane/growshrink.js</a></a></p>
<p>You can see a demo of the plugin on this site: <a href="http://greglane.me/demos/growshrink/">http://greglane.me/demos/growshrink/</a></p>
<p>For details on how to use it, see the README on the repo and have a look through the code in index.html and lib/main.js</p>
<p>Edit: The class has been featured as a &#8216;Notable Class&#8217; on JS Classes. <a href="http://www.jsclasses.org/package/202-JavaScript-Grow-or-shrink-elements-inside-their-parents.html">http://www.jsclasses.org/package/202-JavaScript-Grow-or-shrink-elements-inside-their-parents.html</a></p>
CodeIgniter Library for Encoding/Decoding Morsehttps://greglane.me/code/codeigniter-library-for-encodingdecoding-morse/
Sat, 10 Nov 2012 14:22:59 +0000https://greglane.me/code/codeigniter-library-for-encodingdecoding-morse/<p>I made this library for a bit of fun when I was making <a href="http://vcf.me">http://vcf.me</a></p>
<p>The concept is simple &#8211; it encodes normal text to morse code and decodes morse to text. It&#8217;s quite tolerant of different characters being used for the dots and dashes. Here&#8217;s a <a href="http://morse.dev/index.php/morsecodes">demo</a>.</p>
<p>And you get the code and fork it on Github: <a href="https://github.com/greglane/MorseCodeConverter">https://github.com/greglane/MorseCodeConverter</a></p>
New Website for Imperial FT Ltd.https://greglane.me/web-sites/new-website-for-imperial-ft-ltd/
Thu, 18 Oct 2012 08:07:11 +0000https://greglane.me/web-sites/new-website-for-imperial-ft-ltd/<figure>[<img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-816" title="ImperialFT-small" src="http://greglane.me/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/ImperialFT-small-300x148.png" alt="Imperial Finance & Technology Website" width="300" height="148" />][1]</figure>
<p>I&#8217;ve just built another website for a start-up in Japan. This is a simple bilingual site for Imperial Finance &amp; Technology Ltd. &#8211; a new start-up that is aiming to shake-up the world of portfolio management in Japan. They are some of the nicest people around and they are taking a really innovative open source route in developing their platform. If you&#8217;re interested in the products that they will launch soon or you&#8217;re looking to program apps in a creative, innovative environment then you should definitely sign-up to their email newsletter or get in touch.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.imperial-ft.com/">http://www.imperial-ft.com/</a></p>
New WordPress Theme: NineteenNinetySixhttps://greglane.me/web-sites/new-wordpress-theme-nineteenninetysix/
Tue, 11 Sep 2012 04:15:14 +0000https://greglane.me/web-sites/new-wordpress-theme-nineteenninetysix/<figure>[<img src="http://greglane.me/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/screenshot-1024x550.png" alt="" title="screenshot" width="584" height="313" class="alignnone size-large wp-image-801" />][1]</figure>
<p>WordPress recently <a href="http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/08/28/new-theme-twenty-twelve/">announced the TwentyTwelve theme</a>. This theme follows the TwentyTen and TwentyEleven themes.</p>
<p>Just for a bit of fun, using the TwentyTen theme, I&#8217;ve made the NineteenNinetySix theme to turn your site into a hideous mid 90s web monstrosity.</p>
<p>Features:</p>
<ul>
<li>Comic Sans title font</li>
<li>Marquee Tag</li>
<li>Link buttons with big wide bevels</li>
<li>Meaningless animated gifs</li>
<li>Big serif fonts and default colours</li>
<li>Home-made textured background</li>
</ul>
<p>I was hoping to make it fully HTML 3 and table based but I had to make it pseudo 1996 because of the difficulty of hacking WordPress to use 90s era markup.</p>
<p>To dos:</p>
<ul>
<li>Table based layout</li>
<li>Autoplay midi tune</li>
</ul>
<p>Get it on Github: <a href="https://github.com/greglane/NineteenNinetySix">https://github.com/greglane/NineteenNinetySix</a></p>
Bloghttps://greglane.me/blog/
Mon, 10 Sep 2012 04:33:38 +0000https://greglane.me/blog/New Website for Right Click KKhttps://greglane.me/web-sites/new-website-for-right-click-kk/
Wed, 05 Sep 2012 06:02:10 +0000https://greglane.me/web-sites/new-website-for-right-click-kk/<p>I&#8217;ve just completed a WordPress driven bilingual website for Tokyo based <a title="Right Click Japan - IT Consulting" href="http://rightclick.jp" target="_blank">RightClick KK</a>. You can read more about it in the <a href="http://greglane.me/portfolio">Portfolio Section</a> of this site.<figure></p>
<p><a href="http://greglane.me/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/right-click-japanese.png"><img class="size-medium wp-image-778 alignleft" title="right-click-japanese" src="http://greglane.me/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/right-click-japanese-274x300.png" alt="" width="274" height="300" /></a></figure></p>
Hello!https://greglane.me/about/
Tue, 22 May 2012 01:10:39 +0000https://greglane.me/about/<p><!--:en-->I&#8217;m an NZ born and raised, Tokyo based web developer and sometimes entrepreneur. I&#8217;ve worked with and on the web since I got an internship in 1996 building a multilingual web site for the school of languages at the Norwegian School of Economics.</p>
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Embracing my Inner Cheapohttps://greglane.me/uncategorized/embracing-my-inner-cheapo/
Tue, 10 Apr 2012 04:54:00 +0000https://greglane.me/uncategorized/embracing-my-inner-cheapo/<p>I&#8217;ve just launched a new blog/guide with Chris Kirkland of Artweb and <a href="http://hoboceo.com">hoboceo.com</a> about doing things cheaply in Tokyo entitled <a href="http://tokyocheapo.com">Tokyo Cheapo</a>.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s a common perception that <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxetF7o4aYI">everything in Tokyo costs a fortune</a> and that it&#8217;s much more expensive than anywhere else. Sure, some things can be really expensive in Tokyo, but they don&#8217;t always have to be. In fact some things are much cheaper here than in other major cities. How many places could you get lunch at a *top* restaurant (not just a dodgy tourist trap) for 1,500yen ($US20) including a salad, a main and coffee?</p>
<p>So the blog is about &#8216;hacking&#8217; Tokyo as Tim Ferris would put it. It&#8217;s not about reduced enjoyment or being a tightass &#8211; it&#8217;s about not wasting your money and making it go further.</p>
<p>We&#8217;re open to contributions and suggestions also. Check out the site and tell your friends like in the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcskckuosxQ&amp;feature=related">Faberge Organics shampoo commercial</a>.</p>
<p><a href="http://tokyocheapo.com/">http://tokyocheapo.com/</a></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
‘San’ is not an English word!https://greglane.me/uncategorized/san-is-not-an-english-word/
Mon, 05 Mar 2012 04:06:00 +0000https://greglane.me/uncategorized/san-is-not-an-english-word/<p>I feel a little strange launching into a rant after such a long break from posting, but I felt the need to vent on this particular pet peeve of mine.</p>
<p>&#8216;San&#8217; or (さん) is an honorific in Japanese. I won&#8217;t go into the complexities of when you should and shouldn&#8217;t use it or when you should use &#8216;chan&#8217;, &#8216;sama&#8217; or &#8216;sensei&#8217;. The point I would like to make is that it isn&#8217;t English. In multi-national companies in Japan it seems to be accepted practice to put &#8216;San&#8217; after a person&#8217;s name when emailing in English. Presumably this began as some kind of concession to the cultural norms in Japan without having to go to the effort of actually writing Japanese. Something else that is strange is that I can&#8217;t think of any other situation in which you would use the local honorific when communicating in English. If you wrote to a German colleague in English would you begin with &#8216;Hi Frau Helga&#8217;? Another reason this has probably perpetuated is simple because both sides misunderstand how and when to use the honorifics in the other language. On the flip side, I feel a little strange when a Japanese contact emails me (in Japanese) with just my name with no honorific &#8211; which is basically compulsory in Japanese business email. There&#8217;s an easy solution for all this confusion &#8211; stick to the rules of the language. If a Japanese writer feels they need to use an honorific, how about &#8216;Mr.&#8217; or &#8216;Ms.&#8217;?</p>
<p>Before anyone comes down on me being a language pedant, I mean this only for written communication. If you start a spoken sentence with &#8216;Dave san&#8217; who is to say if it&#8217;s &#8216;San&#8217; or &#8216;さん&#8217;? It&#8217;s spoken, and in spoken English the rules are made to be broken. However, use of &#8216;san&#8217; in English communication is just perpetuating confusion and giving people a false sense that they are actually making an effort to understand Japanese.</p>
A Visit To Tokyo Designers Week 2011https://greglane.me/uncategorized/a-visit-to-tokyo-designers-week-2011/
Sat, 05 Nov 2011 05:13:00 +0000https://greglane.me/uncategorized/a-visit-to-tokyo-designers-week-2011/<p>[wpvideo QUpuYvuB]</p>
<p>[wpvideo I8zx4Ip4]</p>
<p>The 26th edition of Tokyo Designers Week opened on November 1st and runs until the 6th of November. Despite the name, it&#8217;s more of a single location event &#8211; all the other design events on at this time of year are not actually under the TDW umbrella.</p>
<p>My expectations on arrival were not that high. On my last visit to the event a few years ago there was a lot of interesting furniture but nothing that really left an impression. This time the event was a slightly different experience &#8211; there seemed to be much more of a contemporary art focus with a lot of installation type design as well as a lot more of an academic presence with numerous art and technical universities sponsoring and running booths. As a sign of the times, interactive technology also had a strong presence with DoCoMo building an interesting smart phone manipulated environment and Fujitsu creating a sensor based interactive video and music experience.</p>
<p>While there was a lot of innovative Japanese design on show, design from neighbouring countries South Korea and Taiwan also stood out. The Red Dot Design Award winning Korean designed silicone iPhone stand was particularly popular.</p>
<p>Overall TDW 2011 offered a wide range of interesting and innovative creative design. If you miss the last day of the event tomorrow, keep an eye out for the event when it comes around again in 2012.</p></p>
<div class='p_embed p_image_embed'>
<a href="http://greglane.me/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/img_1062-scaled-1000.jpg"><img alt="Img_1062" height="375" src="http://greglane.me/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/img_1062-scaled-1000.jpg?w=300" width="500" /></a><br /> <a href="http://greglane.me/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/img_1067-scaled-1000.jpg"><img alt="Img_1067" height="375" src="http://greglane.me/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/img_1067-scaled-1000.jpg?w=300" width="500" /></a><br /> <a href="http://greglane.me/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/img_1069-scaled-1000.jpg"><img alt="Img_1069" height="375" src="http://greglane.me/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/img_1069-scaled-1000.jpg?w=300" width="500" /></a><br /> <a href="http://greglane.me/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/img_1073-scaled-1000.jpg"><img alt="Img_1073" height="375" src="http://greglane.me/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/img_1073-scaled-1000.jpg?w=300" width="500" /></a></p>
<div class='p_see_full_gallery'>
<a href="http://blog.fusionbureau.com/a-visit-to-tokyo-designers-week-2011">See the full gallery on Posterous</a>
</div>
</div>
LinkedIn Finally Releases a Japanese Versionhttps://greglane.me/uncategorized/linkedin-finally-releases-a-japanese-version/
Thu, 27 Oct 2011 03:36:00 +0000https://greglane.me/uncategorized/linkedin-finally-releases-a-japanese-version/<div class='p_embed p_image_embed'>
<a href="http://greglane.me/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/linkedin2.png"><img alt="Linkedin2" height="285" src="http://greglane.me/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/linkedin2.png?w=300" width="500" /></a>
</div>
<p>On Monday this week, an email was sent to LinkedIn users located in Japan announcing the launch of the Japanese version of the business networking site.</p>
<p>Coming more than eight years after the launch, this has to be one of the slowest localisations of a popular site ever. Digital Garage (the company behind the successful localisation and launch of Twitter in Japan) originally planned to help produce a Japanese version in 2007, although that never came to fruition. There was a new announcement in May this year that Digital Garage was back on the case but there hasn&#8217;t been any mention of DG in this latest development so it&#8217;s unclear if that&#8217;s the reason why we&#8217;re finally seeing a Japanese version.</p>
<p>With the delay in launching a dedicated business &#8216;SNS&#8217; in Japan, a number of companies attempted to launch Japanese equivalents but without the international brand recognition of a site like LinkedIn, they were unable to gain a critical mass. Much more than in western societies, Japanese are reluctant to share personal information in a public forum so the small locally produced sites were never able to gain the necessary trust to get people to sign on. In the absence of a real business social network, facebook has actually become the standard for business social networking in Japan.</p>
<p>With the huge brand recognition and hundreds of thousands of users in Japan already using the English site (a real rarity in Japan) it shouldn&#8217;t take LinkedIn long to usurp facebook as the leading business networking site in Japan.</p>
<p>However, having played around a bit with the Japanese interface it&#8217;s quite clear that the site is still a real work in progress. Despite having a Japanese version of my profile it continues to show me the English one when I click on &#8216;profile&#8217;. Also, despite putting in my central Tokyo postal code, it&#8217;s telling me that I&#8217;m in Tokyo outside the 23 wards rather than inside. These are just small things, but they&#8217;re the difference between a smooth user experience and one in which the user has to make an extra effort to use it.</p>
<p>Now that they LinkedIn are putting an effort into the Japanese version these kinks will be quickly ironed out. The question will be whether business people in Japan will be willing to share &#8216;personal&#8217; info such as companies they have worked for and schools they have attended.</p>
6 Considerations For an International Corporate Visual Identityhttps://greglane.me/uncategorized/6-considerations-for-an-international-corporate-visual-identity/
Wed, 19 Oct 2011 07:36:00 +0000https://greglane.me/uncategorized/6-considerations-for-an-international-corporate-visual-identity/<div class='p_embed p_image_embed'>
<a href="http://greglane.me/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/maccas.jpg"><img alt="Maccas" height="472" src="http://greglane.me/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/maccas.jpg?w=300" width="500" /></a>
</div>
<p>Just to make this clear from the outset, &#8216;Corporate Identity&#8217; is about a lot more than a logo.&nbsp; A logo can be a unifier that ties everything together, but CI is about everything that your customers (or staff) are likely to come into contact with.&nbsp; It includes the name of your company, slogans, symbols, colours, the clothes that employees wear to client meetings and in the office, business cards, presentations, the way you answer the phone, the tone and speed of email responses and even your customers.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s usually the more authentic, organic aspects of a business that shape the visual elements of a business&#8217;s corporate identity rather than the other way around.&nbsp; For example, if you&#8217;re an expensive, discreet, trustworthy legal firm you&#8217;re probably not going to want an electric pink colour theme with comic sans as your primary font.</p>
<p>Within a domestic context, it&#8217;s possible to get a pretty good handle on all this and project a consistent image.&nbsp; However, when an international aspect is added to a business there are suddenly diverse cultural and linguistic considerations that mean that you may have to rethink your entire visual system.&nbsp; So here are a few things to think about when you start on developing the visual aspects of your international corporate identity.</p>
<ol>
<li>Challenge your Assumptions</li>
</ol>
<p>Something that has meaning in one culture may mean something completely different in another.&nbsp; You may think a colour, font or mascot communicates one thing but in another culture it may have a completely different significance.&nbsp; Visuals including animals, traditional symbols and gestures are particularly susceptible to this.</p>
<ol>
<li>Local scripts</li>
</ol>
<p>In the Americas, Africa or Western Europe, it&#8217;s not usually necessary to change the script in which the name of your company is written.&nbsp; However, in some countries, a version of the name written in local script is required by law.&nbsp; In others, locals may not even be able to read Latin script &#8211; especially for words containing non phonetic spelling.&nbsp; Also don&#8217;t assume that because countries share a similar script that the same will apply in each country.&nbsp; For example, in Japan it is very unusual for an international company to use Chinese characters to write the company name but in China, this is the norm.</p>
<ol>
<li>Changing your name</li>
</ol>
<p>Ideally, an international company wants to leverage its international brand when entering a new market so that brand building doesn&#8217;t have to start from zero.&nbsp; However, sometimes it makes sense to go for a different name or a variation on the name.&nbsp; The illustration above is a good example &#8211; McDonalds decided that the &#8216;s&#8217; was superfluous for Japan so the localised name (written in Katakana script) is just &#8216;McDonald&#8217; (or more precisely &#8216;makkudonarudo&#8217;).&nbsp; The case of McDonalds Japan highlights another issue with an international brand &#8211; local trademarks.&nbsp; McDonald&#8217;s were beaten by a day to registration of their own trademark in Japan resulting in a legal battle lasting 16 years.&nbsp;&nbsp; Another example of a company that tweaked its brand in Japan was ice cream shop Baskin Robbins.&nbsp; In Japan it is commonly known as &#8217;31&#8217; from its original slogan of &#8217;31 flavours&#8217;.&nbsp; Presumably the thinking was that &#8217;31&#8217; would be easier for Japanese speakers to pronounce and remember.</p>
<ol>
<li>A one size fits all approach or an adaptable visual system</li>
</ol>
<p>The approach of international marketers over the last twenty years or so has been to build consistent &#8216;global&#8217; brands.&nbsp; Often there is a strong push of strategy and creative from head office to international offices.&nbsp; German multinational DHL maintains a strict consistency by keeping all logos and tag lines in English irrespective of the location.&nbsp; The other approach is to allow for flexibility in the corporate identity.&nbsp; This could include prescribing standard ways in which the logo can be adapted &#8211; for example a localised version of the name could be included above, below or to the right of the global logo.&nbsp; This could also include specifying equivalent fonts in local character sets (as McDonalds has done in the image above) or an alternative colour palette.</p>
<ol>
<li>Go the whole hog</li>
</ol>
<p>Corporate Identity is often the reflection of many years of accumulated culture.&nbsp; When developing an international corporate identity it can be easy to forget the aspects that are separate from typical elements such as logos, web sites, business cards and stationery.&nbsp; This is sometimes seen in tech startups who open offices overseas.&nbsp; Whereas the head office is a fun, creative, relaxed environment the office in Tokyo is just like that of every other company.&nbsp; Adjusting a corporate identity for an international market doesn&#8217;t mean you need to make your working environment the same as every other company in the market.&nbsp; This is where disconnects can occur &#8211; corporate identity becomes a facade rather than a genuine expression of the company</p>
<ol>
<li>Go with your gut</li>
</ol>
<p>When going into any new market, there are always a plethora of agencies and consultants ready to give you an opinion on your brand and your CI.&nbsp; They typically get paid for the amount of work they do so of course they&#8217;re going to come up with a long list of &#8216;problems&#8217; that need to be solved &#8211; whether they are genuine risks or not.&nbsp; The key is having someone on your side with intimate local knowledge who can balance the unique aspects of your corporate identity with the needs of the market and to a certain extent just trusting your intuition.</p>
A Flood of Art, Design and Media events in Tokyohttps://greglane.me/uncategorized/a-flood-of-art-design-and-media-events-in-tokyo/
Mon, 17 Oct 2011 05:40:00 +0000https://greglane.me/uncategorized/a-flood-of-art-design-and-media-events-in-tokyo/<div class='p_embed p_image_embed'>
<a href="http://greglane.me/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/tdw2011-scaled-1000.jpg"><img alt="Tdw2011" height="238" src="http://greglane.me/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/tdw2011-scaled-1000.jpg?w=300" width="500" /></a>
</div>
<p>In mid to late autumn of each year there is a flurry of interesting art, design and media related events in Tokyo.&nbsp; Here are a few that we&#8217;ll be either attending or keeping an eye on.</p>
<p><strong>Digital Content Expo 2011</strong></p>
<p>Thursday, the 20th of October to Saturday, the 22nd of October</p>
<p>This is what it says.&nbsp; The best of Japanese CG and 3D art and animation will be on display.&nbsp; There will also be a wide range of hi-tech companies showing off such things as interactive tables, thermal drawing devices and the latest in 3D cameras and display technology.</p>
<p><a href="http://dcexpo.jp/en/access/">http://dcexpo.jp/en/access/</a></p>
<p><strong>AdTech Tokyo</strong></p>
<p>Wednesday, the 26th of October to Friday, the 28th of October</p>
<p>This is an industry event for the ad business with lots of closed seminars and heavy hitting agency types giving key notes.&nbsp; However, free entrance can be obtained with pre-registration which will give you access to the main exhibition hall and some of the sponsored rooms.&nbsp; Last year Microsoft was showing off the Kinect before it&#8217;s public release and Adobe had some interesting seminars about their approach to helping in the production of iPad/tablet magazines like &#8216;Wired&#8217;.&nbsp; More &#8216;business&#8217; than &#8216;creative&#8217;, but very interesting and inspirational nonetheless.<br />
<a href="http://www.adtech-tokyo.com">http://www.adtech-tokyo.com</a></p>
<p><strong>Design Tide Tokyo</strong></p>
<p>Sunday, the 29th of October to Thursday, the 3rd of November</p>
<p>Design Tide started as the upstart event in 2005.&nbsp; However, in recent years it has been solidly establishment with its base at the upmarket Tokyo Midtown complex near Roppongi Station.&nbsp; As opposed to TDW, Design Tide is a &#8216;curated&#8217; event so not just anyone is allowed to exhibit here &#8211; or perhaps you just need to know the right people.&nbsp; The tough times that the design industry has been going through (along with everyone else) is perhaps reflected in the theme of this year&#8217;s event.&nbsp; &#8220;Trading design. Trading Ideas&#8221;.&nbsp; Time to cash in.</p>
<p><a href="https://designtide.jp/tide2011/">https://designtide.jp/tide2011/</a></p>
<p><strong>Tokyo Designers Week</strong></p>
<p>Tuesday, the 1st of Novermber to Sunday, the 6th of Novermber</p>
<p>This event has become an institution in the Tokyo design scene.&nbsp; There tends to be a strong focus on product and interior design but the work on display can be quite diverse.&nbsp; There seem to be a few less exhibitors than last year.&nbsp; The theme in English is &#8216;Love/Arigatou&#8217; while the theme in Japanese is still &#8216;Love&#8217; but instead of &#8216;Arigatou&#8217; it&#8217;s &#8216;Love of the earth, love of people and love of things&#8217;.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.tdwa.com/en/">http://www.tdwa.com/en/</a></p>